Nuclear Thermal is a dead end.
For a reaction a million times more powerful than chemicals a little more than double the Isp.
For great expense the result is not proportional and a tremendous waste of resources.
Stan Ulam, one of the great geniuses of the 20th century, realized that it was hard enough keeping a chemical rocket from melting and trying to contain nuclear energy was pointless. He thought outside that box and developed the concept of Nuclear Pulse Propulsion, and he considered it his greatest work.
Nuclear Pulse has always been the only viable path to Interplanetary Travel, and will be for a long time to come:
It is no use discussing this with fanboys because they have been programmed to mock and denigrate the concept of Nuclear Pulse. Entrepreneurs will never be allowed possession of nuclear pulse devices- only governments will have control and that is blasphemy to the NewSpace Cult.
Unfortunately, the originally specified pressure-fed ocean-recovered boosters were and are the key to a Super Heavy Lift Vehicle program. Being pressure-fed they would be tough enough to land in the ocean with parachutes and could take a great deal of abuse. Likely built like nuclear submarines pressure hulls. But that did not happen and nobody is looking at it now. As a second stage the Starship might work well. But there is a practical limit to how tall it can be and adding a third stage to it’s present configuration is not going to work.
It is just not good any way you look at it.
“-programmed to mock and denigrate the concept of Nuclear Pulse-“
NSWR instantly became the worst nuclear propulsion design ever proposed. Where almost nothing can go wrong with Pulse, the NSWR is dangerous and unworkable in every way.
Only Bob Zubrin could make the case for blowing up a spaceship with it.
The NSWR makes almost as little sense as going to Mars.
Nuclear Pulse is mocked and denigrated by NewSpace for several reasons, the main one being it is not and cannot be a SpaceX product. Nuclear Pulse Propulsion “evokes” admiration for the scientific genius of people like Stanislaw Ulam, Freeman Dyson, Wernher von Braun, Arthur C. Clarke, and even anti-nuclear activist Carl Sagan, ALL of whom either helped develop or endorsed Nuclear Pulse Propulsion.
Sarcasm and nonsense verbage, troll-smile emoticon juvenile garbage; this is what scientifically ignorant fanboys do. And do so well.
Nuclear Pulse is mocked and denigrated by NewSpace for several reasons, the main one being it is not a SpaceX product. Nuclear Pulse Propulsion “evokes” admiration for the scientific genius of people like Stanislaw Ulam, Freeman Dyson, Wernher von Braun, Arthur C. Clarke, and even anti-nuclear activist Carl Sagan, ALL of whom either helped develop or endorsed Nuclear Pulse Propulsion.
Sarcasm and nonsense verbage, troll-smile emoticon juvenile garbage; this is what scientifically ignorant fanboys do. And do so well.
Perhaps this is a foot-in-the-door for this company because they know Nuclear Thermal is a very inefficient way to use nuclear energy for space propulsion. The name of the company might be a hint they have other things in mind. Ronald Reagan’s Star Wars is the key to super-efficient nuclear space propulsion:
https://iceonthemoon.org/th…
Yes….it does not look to be practical at all. Confining that kind of a continuous nuclear reaction is a huge challenge and the penalty for failure is over-the-top horrible any way you look at it. Nuclear Thermal has to be kept down to such low temperatures that the Isp is super low for such a large investment. The saltwater rocket is an order of magnitude more difficult to make work than Nuclear Thermal and will likely cost an order of magnitude more but is simply too hazardous to be practical. Formulating the saltwater “fuel”, let alone making the actual engine work, is a nightmare.
Non-starter.
Nuclear Pulse, on the other hand, has always been the gold standard and go-to as being almost guaranteed to succeed. And really, with the trillions spent on this technology, and over a thousand actual tests, it is as close to guaranteed as it gets.
A sufficiently gargantuan Space Solar Energy infrastructure can beam-propel a world-ship out of our solar system at some percentage of the speed of light. And that ship can slow down when it reaches it’s destination star centuries in the future by using H-bombs. So we can actually possibly build starships now with present technology. Have to turn the Moon into a mega-factory first of course. The real trick is freezing people, which would make a world-ship much smaller and far more practical. Freezing people without damage is actually not that big of a technical challenge. Though massively shielded, just the particles already present in cells would necessitate reviving passengers every so many years for a few months for cellular self-repair. So for a voyage of several centuries the passenger might age a few years.
A new Earth is not really required for humans to expand into the galaxy. A sufficiently resource rich asteroid belt/Kuiper belt would allow humans to construct artificial hollow spinning moons and support populations in the tens of billions.
Not really open to that “possibility.” There is just too much hype following SpaceX claims. An unbiased look at what they have accomplished reveals they have not worked any miracles. Elon’s people have done some good work that the great one takes credit for but much of what they are doing now is bound to fail…and fail badly. The shiny is essentially a stainless Shuttle external tank with some fins, heat tiles, and some engines. A computer program lets it land vertically.
It uses a booster with far too many engines and sacrifices a huge amount of lift to bring all that structure back. No escape system. And the list goes on.
Ice on the Moon 